MA Dissertation GP14024720

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How Photography has Changed its Nature, From a Form of Art to a Global Mass Language, Due to the Convergence Between Camera Phones, the Internet, and

Social Media Platforms.

Gioele Pagotto

UoB Number: 14024720

MA Media Studies

Media Dissertation (PG)

EM-4046Z

Date: 07/05/2016

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Contents Introduction Page 3 Chapter One Page 5 Photography as a form of art Chapter Two Page 13 The advent of digital and the following convergence between camera phones, the omnipresence of the internet, and social media platforms Conclusions Page 29 Bibliography Page 31

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Introduction The aim of this dissertation is to describe the change in photography from a form of art to a global mass language through the advent of digital in society, and in particular the influence of technology, that has determined a sociological change in communication on a global scale. First of all, it is important to contextualise what is intended by ‘art’, and how photography can be identified with its meaning: for this purpose the Institutionalist Pragmatism theory of Howard S. Becker is important, because his contribute to the collective activity and conventions is helpful for understanding of what is meant with art world from a sociological point of view; secondly, the contribute which has been particularly helpful is from Niklas Luhmann, because he focuses his research on the concept of world of art as a social system, and the importance of the activity of psychic systems on human beings through the capacity of observation, a fundamental factor in photography. So the two theorists mentioned above are the most suitable to describe art, and how photography is associated with it, explaining its influence both on sociology and psychology. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the “symbolic interaction approach used by Becker can be considered a predecessor of Luhmann’s thinking” (Van Maanen 2009), based on the concept of social system which “do not consist of relations between people, but between communications” (Van Maanen 2009). Subsequently, the second part of the discourse is related to the advent of digital which has revolutionised the entire society, causing a drastic change in photography from a technological point of view. In turn since the beginning of the new millennium technology has affected the speed of change with two paramount convergences. The first one has been the convergence between computing devices and cameras, thus giving an instrumental adherence between two kinds of tools that until then were separated: in fact “before phone camera there was a physical difference between the device that took the photos and the medium that communicated it” (Larsen and Sandbye 2014). The second convergence, that has been more significant from a sociological point of view, was the one between the three key factors, the camera phone devices, the ubiquity of the internet in public and private spaces, and the presence of social media, that have provided a platform for sharing photographic material with other users: in this way “the camera phone attached to a communication network, enables the effortless communication of photos over distances without delays” (Larsen and Sandbye 2014), creating “a new model of understanding photos as a language” (Moschovi, McKay and Plouviez 2013). Considering these aspects, the influence of technology operated by people has defined the decisive change on the nature of photography, from an artistic expression to a form of instantaneous communication, suitable to be practised

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globally due to the uselessness of any verbal translation. In effect, the second convergence has created “a whole different culture of producing and consuming photos, allowing users to express themselves in new ways to a range of potential audiences on a global scale” (Moschovi, McKay and Plouviez 2013). Furthermore, this dissertation explores some important phenomena that have played huge roles in this contemporary revolution, such as the fusion between private and public spheres within society, the merging of real and virtual, the interplay that occurs through the concepts of presence and absence and their relationships with time and space, all aspects essential to understand the essence of photography.

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Chapter One Photography as a form of art

The contribute of Howard S. Becker is important for the purpose of this dissertation because it investigates on the meaning of art, focusing on the sociological impact of art world, which helps to understand its connection with photography, and thus the modern concept of it in social media. The core question in this chapter is what is intended with art, what is the nature of its meaning, and especially “who can confer to something the status of candidate for appreciation, and thus ratify it as art?” (Van Maanen 2009). By the Becker’s point of view there is a fundamental factor that gets the answer to the question, which is the act of connection between participants that describe art world as a cooperative activity. With the term ‘participants’, it has to be intended the group of people which comprehends both artists and audience, where the cooperation takes place between artistic production and its reception by the public, which constitutes the ‘answer’, the reaction of who consumes the artwork. In this frame, it must be considered the aspect of consensus, decisive for the acceptation of a certain artwork as a form of art. Besides the audience, the consensus is generally an act of approval which is generated by an institutional apparatus: in this way, Becker assumes that “there is no fixed number of person to be involved or amount of equipment to be used” (Van Maanen 2009), because “any artistic connectivity can be done by one person, who performs all the necessary activities” (Becker 1982). Nowadays, in social media environment, Becker’s statements made more than thirty years ago sounds very actual, because reflecting about photographic production, there is a huge amount of material that circulates on the internet made by users, and there is no need of a particular equipment for taking shots: camera phones incorporate all that is necessary, and the artistic connectivity can be executed immediately through the support of the ubiquity of the internet and social media platforms. Considering the influence of these factors on society, the chance of giving to everyone the possibility to easily produce photographs, determines the construction of a system of acceptation of the artistic value of an image, based on users consensus. The network of users, in this case, is organised in a worldwide macro group of professional photographers, basic photographers or amateurs, who judge through the participation, constituted for example by the liking activity, elevating a picture to an artwork level or not. By the way, it is interesting to notice here that the term ‘user’ should be substituted by the new term “prosumer” (Toffler 1980), a fusion between ‘user’ and ‘consumer’,

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where individuals participate in “an online communication platform that combines features of e-mail, instant messaging, photo-sharing, and blogging programs, as well as a way to monitor one’s friends’ online social activity” (Cohen 2008): in this way, a person in the social media environment is both judged when posting a picture and a judger when he observes and gives an opinion on a picture of another individual. Then, Becker affirms the necessity of “organising de novo an art world which will ratify as art what one produces” (Becker 1982), and in this direction the concept of social media can be reputed a place where art world is finding new space; following the words of George Dickie, for which “a new subsystem would be added within a system” (Becker 1982), it can be assumed the internet is constituting the new frame which has not only influenced, but also changed the existing system where art world exists. Participants, or “prosumers”, of this new order in fact “engage in a form of collective activity and thus constitute an art world” (Becker 1982), confirming that participation between artists and audience actually is the most important link that makes the new art world possible. By the way, the nature of “prosumers” reflects the character of new technologies such as camera phones and tablets, which are instruments through which people use and produce information within the network: so, human being and technology adhere, as confirmation of the fact that computing devices have become human body appendixes. Following Becker’s theories, for which relationship between institutions and participants have to be developed, the social media revolution has constricted institutions to adapt themselves to the new dynamics, in which, like for the artists, they have to extend their relationships with participants. This is the case of the National Geographic Society, which has developed the National Geographic Your Shot internet site, a social media that allows photographers of all categories to share their pictures with other people. Also here the boost that animates the initiative is participation, through the opportunity given to contributors to like, comment, and potentially share the photographs taken, not only within the community, but also on a global scale: so, it is possible to understand how a pivotal organisation in photography, has established a connection with its supporters, making possible for them to be an active part in the institution. With art world Becker intends “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organised via their joined knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for” (Becker 1982): again, here it is possible to recognise that social media activity is a cooperative activity of individuals, that continuously produce photographs, released in circulation on the internet, that in turn acts as a network.

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Becker’s statement shows two main characteristics, on one side the collective activity, and on the other side the conventions. In reference to what concerns the collective activity, Becker has developed an ideal list of seven steps in making art: when recognizing these conventions it will be clear, the photographic activity that can be perfectly associated with them. The first one is to develop of an idea about a certain “kind of work and its form” (Van Maanen 2009), for instance, in photographic terms that can be the choice of a subject. The idea will be the incarnation of an artwork, which in this case is represented by a photograph. The second step is how the idea must be executed: with a smartphone device it only needs a screen touch. The third stage is the necessity to obtain materials and equipment in order to accomplish the execution of the idea. Tools “such as paints, cameras or musical instruments” (Van Maanen 2009) have to be manufactured. Then, the fourth and the fifth stage consist in the distribution and the support of the idea, in order to reach the audience: if once money was needed for that, now a photograph posted on a social media can potentially arrive to millions of people in a short time length, without any expense: so especially at this point it can be noticed how the internet has changed the distribution phase, by creating the platforms where an artwork can be shared. Finally, the last two activities certificate the effective existence of an artwork, the response and appreciation by the audience, which in social media context is represented by the activity of “prosumers” in producing and consuming. This assumption implies that the nature of artwork is contained in its consumption, and this is in agreement with Marx’s theory, for which “in contrast with the merely natural object, the product affirms itself as a product only in the consumption of it, becomes only a product in this act. By decomposing the product, it is the consumption that gives the product its finishing touch” (Marx 1973 [1857]). Finally, the last activity consists in creating and maintaining the rationale which means that an artwork must remain intact in its cogency, a sort of coherence with its meaning: so, the idea that has been executed through a certain equipment, in the act of distribution and support obtains a response from the audience, keeping safe its rationality in all these passages. Along this path, it can be observed that some kind of practical activities, like the execution of an artwork that request physical actions, are mixed with some others tied with human thoughts, such as response and appreciation, where psychology is involved, that in turn confers a more abstract character to the whole dynamic. This context, where both material and abstract principles work together, brings the discourse to the conventions role within Becker’s thought: in fact he said that they impose the materials to be employed and “the abstractions to be used to convey

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particular ideas or experiences” (Becker 1982), but especially “the forms in which materials and abstractions will be combined” (Becker 1982). It is clear that this combination is the same that influences the modern concept of photography, because it can be noticed that camera phones are physical tools that allow people to take pictures, that on the contrary are pure abstract software files. If once the production institutions used to be those who assimilate what artists do and what audiences appreciate, now it is no longer the case. In fact, “non-standard distribution channels” (Becker 1982) are globally replacing the traditional concept of production, distribution, and consumption of photographs, where artists have the opportunity to produce shots using camera phone devices, and immediately distribute their material to social media thanks to the omnipresence of the internet. In this way, production and distribution are individually conducted, while consumption is developed in a collective act of response by the audience: what has been really altered is that these actions are identified in the circuit based on the technological convergence, where real and virtual spheres are fused together. Nonetheless, Becker claimed that “self-support and patronage can set the artist free from existing distribution systems in a financial sense, but not from distribution as such, at least if he wants to be an artist” (Van Maanen 2009): the internet and social media structures like Instagram have let free distribution of artworks from any need of patronage, becoming mediators between producers and consumers of artworks. Moreover, looking at the revolution that has changed the links between art production and art reception, Becker has pointed out that “breaking with existing conventions and their manifestations (...) increases artists’ trouble and decreases the circulation of their work, but at the same time increases their freedom to choose unconventional alternatives and to depart substantially from customary practise” (Becker 1982). Internet has produced the unconventional alternatives mentioned by Becker, clearly identifiable in the abundance of social media, but paradoxically the potential possibility given to people to produce art material has generated an inverse situation in which the number of art works has drastically increased changing the artists’ trouble: on one side he can easily share material, but on the other there is a huge competition, due to the huge number of art works produced and shared every day. This aspect has also changed the view in which the intermediaries who run the distribution systems “want to rationalise the relatively unstable and erratic production of ‘creative work, because they are the business” (Becker 1982): photographic production is not “unstable and erratic” anymore, on the contrary, it has become a massive and continuous flux through social media. Victor Nee has discovered that institutions conceived as systems of rules “constrain or encourage innovative individual action” (Brinton and Nee 1998) and “a change of paradigms in the institutional environment (often launched on a governmental

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level) makes new organisational forms possible” (Ingram and Nee 1998): the internet dynamics has determined a radical change, where the audience of mass media has evolved in “prosumers” who consume and produce information at the same time, and as a consequence, traditional mass media are no longer the unique news gatekeepers. In this way, the amount of data has drastically increased, generating a flux of information that is organised in a huge network in which everybody can be a potential news producer. For such reason “prosumers” have become the centre of the attention of social media organisations, because they need their “labour” as Nicole Cohen (2008) explained, saying that “such activity does not produce material goods nor is defined by terms of a wage-labour relationship, but is a source of value for Web 2.0 companies. The business models of Web 2.0 ventures depend on the performance of free labour without it there would be no content and therefore no profit” (Cohen 2008). However, “the extent to which immaterial labour is a dominant force in contemporary capitalism (and if, in fact, it is a useful category at all) has been contested, it is a useful way of understanding the work involved in social networking sites: members add value to commodities via the production of a cultural or affective component of the commodity, which are online social relations” (Cohen 2008), highlighting where the real value of the networked communicative flux is contained. This is the context where social media have become platforms where great amounts of connections have taken place: this is how they have established a new organisational form of communication, thus changing the paradigms within the institutional environment, as theorised by Nee. So, it is possible to comprehend that “networks are seen as sets of relationships directly connected to exchange or transactional activities, whereas institutions function in relation to these networks as sets of guiding and controlling principles, norms and patterns of acting, operating around the network, as well as inside it and internalized by actors in the network” (Van Maanen 2009): it is all right, but the factor that has changed is that the social media impact has positioned them at the centre of attention, making them independent from institutions. Indeed, in this way they have obtained the status of institution that regulates the network, and thus overturned the previous power balance. If Becker talks about “art world as a network of people who cooperate” (Van Maanen 2009), bringing a sociological contribute, Niklas Luhmann moves the focus on social systems, not intending them “as relation between people, but between communications” (Van Maanen 2009), where psychology assumes the core position in the discourse.

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Luhmann recognises four types of social systems, machines, organisms, social systems and psychic systems, where “the latter two and the relationship between them” (Van Maanen 2009) are of interest for this dissertation, because they help us understanding the “world of art as a social system” (Van Maanen 2009). So, art is communication in an absolute sense, and the mechanism through which individuals’ participation takes place is based on the production of artworks, a type of communication between observation and interpretation where the psychic system acts, and the consequent reception by other people is another communication matter. Regarding photography, the artistic communication has its foundation in the relationship between an artist and the viewers, where the image is the linking connection between the two sides: in this view, the objective is the understanding of the reactions of human beings to art, and photography in particular. Hens Laermans has explained Luhmann’s theory that connects social systems and psychic systems, where “psychic systems run the operations of consciousness, and their outcomes are feelings, thoughts, imaginations and perceptions, but they can only run on the basis of operations in the nervous system, which receives stimuli from outside and makes perception possible. In contrast, communications, which are observations in a material form, are based on perceptions and are, in turn, perceived by others” (Van Maanen 2009). So, as a matter of fact photography is strongly influenced by the principle of observation, which “is motivated by recursive interconnections - partly by prior observations, hence memory, and partly through connectivity, that is by anticipating what one can do with the distinction” (Laermans 2000). In this situation, art is the vehicle through which “perception is available for communication” (Laermans 2000): the two phenomena do not interact until art connects them, and in this view “artworks as communications are ‘sensuously perceptible objects’ used by the psychic system to generate ‘intensities of experience’ (that, by the way, remain themselves incommunicable)” (Van Maanen 2009). Therefore, if “nervous systems produce physical stimuli for the brain and psychic systems produce perceptive observations, feelings or thoughts, different social systems (e.g. the science system or the art system) produce their own types of communication (for example, scientific publications and reaction to them; artworks and reaction to them)” (Van Maanen 2009). Following and associating this line of reasoning with photography, it can be deduced that psychic systems, producing psychological reactions like perceptions and observations, put into action the same mechanism characterised by the interconnection between memory and connectivity, which in turn produces an emotional reaction of an individual placed in front of an image.

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As a result, it is clear that “communications make use of psychic observations and the other way round, just as psychic systems use stimuli of the nervous system to produce perceptions” (Van Maanen 2009). But what about artistic communication? Looking at Luhmann’s theories, one of his main focus is the fact that every kind of communication can generate an infinite series of possible communications, thus “the possibilities not chosen remain present as the unmarked part of the realized communication” (Van Maanen 2009): so, “it is extremely complex for participants in the system to select adequate communicative reactions” (Van Maanen 2009). In the art context, communications need a reduction of complexity, in which two main factors play a fundamental role: expectation and meaning. On one side, the concept of ‘meaning’, intended as “a system of concepts shared by participants in a social system” (Van Maanen 2009) can facilitate the communication through a certain number of “possible and meaningful observing choices” (Van Maanen 2009), in which the psychic system develop this process through a “structure of expectations” (Luhmann 1984). In turn, ‘expectations’ are intended as “structural orientations” which “retail selectively the horizon of meaning fully linked to communications” (Laermans 2000). In Luhmann’s view “only aesthetic utterances can be understood as the communications of an art system, because they speak the same language, one that differs from other languages in its capacity to produce perceptions in a material shape and consequently to focus on form” (Van Maanen 2009): in the same way, aesthetic is the communicational medium that characterises the understanding of photography without the necessity of any translation between individuals. Moreover, art is founded on a merging between “a real world and an imaginary world” (Luhmann 2000): in this frame, it can be recognised that photography is fundamentally composed by the same interplay, because on the one hand reality is depicted through the lens, and in particular the subject of the image, while on the other hand the power of imagination gives the viewer the key to the interpretation of a picture. The three major types of communication present in the art system are identified in “works of art, communications about art and, as a part of the latter group, utterances about the experience a work of art has produced” (Van Maanen 2009): so, it is a process of cause and effect, where “artistic communications generate intensities of experience in the psychic system of people” (Van Maanen 2009). At this point, it is important to understand how this artistic experience related to the psychic system of an individual, can be expanded to the “system of everyday-life communications” (Van Maanen 2009): when a “prosumer” shares a picture depicting his living experience of a certain moment, he can immediately find in social media the platform where the so-called everyday-life communication is practised among society.

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If once the interaction systems allowed people to be only “physically present in a certain situation, like a dinner, a party, in the street or at the marketplace” (Van Maanen 2009), nowadays, with social media photography, a new communication system has been constructed, where individuals can interact simultaneously from many different places, replacing the physical absence in space with an immediate possibility to display, and thus to share an instant of time with its happening through an image. In this sense, vernacular photography is “a performative practise connected to ‘presence’, as opposed to the storing of ‘precious’ memories for eternity, which is how it has hitherto been conceptualized” (Larsen 2014). After the observations of the theories of Becker and Luhmann, it can be observed that “communications concerning works of art and the experiences they brought about can, conversely, do their work in interaction systems of another social system (especially in the social system of social communication), since these interaction systems have the same lack of differentiation” (Van Maanen 2009): in this way the influence of social media photography has transformed a form of art in an interaction system. In fact, as a confirmation we find that “a communication based on artistic perception that acquires a place in such a chain of communications (in other words, becoming a real communication) will influence the original psychic outcome, and its place in the communicator’s mental system as a whole, in a kind of feedback loop to the psychic system” (Van Maanen 2009).

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Chapter Two The advent of digital and the following convergence between camera phones, the

internet, and social media platforms. With the flow of time, technology has always given its contribute to the evolution of photography, changing the use of the medium and consequently the production of images and their consumption by people. With the advent of digital during the nineties, photography has drastically changed its nature, which until that moment was identified with analogue: William Mitchell baptised it as a “post-photographic era”, in which photography has been “radically and permanently displaced by the new breed of digital imaging” (Mitchell 1992). In particular, the revolution that took place, has involved the passage from photography as a physical cellulose body to a hybrid and mutable nature, which is the characteristic of digital image. As stated by Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis in their article A Life More Photographic, “the photographic darkroom and the photo lab were replaced by Photoshop and a colour printer” (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008), and consequently “the ability to make prints without the need for a home darkroom, and the ease with which old, faded prints could be improved or restored convinced many photographers to swap the photo lab for domestic digital set-up” (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008): this shift has signified in particular an increase of photographic practice among amateurs, which has been stimulated by the possibility to produce and elaborate images in complete autonomy. Since then, photography has been transformed in a practice rigorously tied with computer technology in which pictures consists of files stored inside databases ready to be processed and consumed through screen displays: as Fred Ritchin said “the fidelity of the mechanical age was being replaced by the fluidity of the digital” (Ritchin 2010). The materiality of analogue needed physical space where to allocate pictures, while the immateriality of the digital has provided a new idea of storage based on computer memories. Hence, if once photographs used to be subject to wear and tear, now their digital file feature assures the conservation with a higher longevity perspective. Moreover, an important aspect that has arose from the passage to digital, is the extension of the photographic process to a post-production stage. In fact, practicing photography with films required specific competency in order to capture the best possible shot considering features like light availability, reflections and, in general, the circumstances that characterise the environment where the picture was taken.

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Nowadays post-production has expanded the field of photography production through computer programs, giving the possibility to correct errors, or to emphasise certain factors like brightness, contrast, saturation, and colour adjustment. It must be clarified that digital has not simplified the practice of photography: despite the improvement of image conservation, in order to avoid the loss of quality in the storage of large loads of pictures, the whole photographic process has become more complex to meet the standards of information technology knowledge applied in digital cameras and post-production computer programs. In this context, it is interesting to read what Andy Grunberg said about the development of photography more than twenty years ago, affirming that “if photography survives into the next century, it will be as something more overtly fabricated, manipulative, artifactual, and self-conscious than the photography we have come to know” (Grunberg 1990). Here it can be noticed how the meaning of photography has changed, especially if we consider what usually happens before and after the shot: Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, called punctum the detail which catches the sensitivity of the photographer (or Operator), and studium the observations process, in which there is “an application to a thing” (Barthes 1980) and “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment” (Barthes 1980) for the photographic outcome. But unlike Barthes’ thought for which both punctum and studium are moments relevant to a photograph already taken, it should be rather considered that punctum represents the spark which turns on the attention of the photographer who subsequently will take the shot, while studium can be identified as the post-production activity, in which the image is analysed and adjusted. According to the author’s view, punctum and studium are the ingredients of an adventure, which consists in an “internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken” (Barthes 1980), where photography is the manifestation of a human experience involving the irrationality of emotions and surpassing the use of words. This form of attraction, which conjugates human sensitivity and psychology, is the key point for understanding the revolution that is occurring in photography, characterised by the convergence of the spread use of camera phones, the omnipresence of the internet and social media platforms. A sociological change has occurred, in which technology has “introduced a whole different culture of producing and consuming photos, allowing users to express themselves in new ways to a range of potential audiences on a global scale” (Moschovi, McKay, and Plouviez 2013), determining a new form of global mass language. In social media environment, the punctum of an image can be identified with the unbridgeable distance in space that separates the sender and the receiver, where the latter could feel a desire sensation for what the other is doing in the same

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moment, for example the fact of looking at a picture of a friend in an exotic place while the viewer is working in an office on a rainy day: the omnipresence of camera phone devices allows people to “cover the unexpected moments of the mundane life” (Villi 2010), thus increasing the chances for a viewer to be captured by the punctum of a shot which apparently could be labelled as one among many others. Nowadays, in social media photography, it is evident that the feeling of punctum, the impulse that drives a human being to immortalise a certain moment, is really widespread among people, considering the huge amount of photographic material produced and consumed everyday; the studium as well has been intensified and become more detailed, due to the indispensable knowledge of photo editing programs. In an article appeared on The New Yorker online edition, Om Malik talks about the new “one-hundred-and-forty-nine-dollar” (Malik et al. 2016) photo-editing software made by Google in collaboration with Adobe, thus realising how the studium recognised in the post production seems to be a practice ever more included in the photographic process. Then, the author continues talking about the specifics of the program, saying that it “can mimic old film stock, add analog photo effects, or turn color shots into black-and-white photos” (Malik et al. 2016) and transform modestly good photos into magical ones” (Malik et al. 2016): it seems that the concept of photography is becoming an absolute research of beauty of the image, something related to narcissism as well as to aesthetics. So, the reproduction of reality is rather giving way to the alteration of it, in which the representation is modified in order to perform what an individual wants to show about himself, in a sort of personal showroom. The use of camera phones has deeply changed photography because they have become “bodily extension, whereby we ‘touch’ the world, and the assessment of the photograph immediately following the shooting situation is part of a social act” (Sandbye 2016), where the internet not only has made possible a global connection, but it also represents the sociological network through which images are distributed and consumed. Therefore, it can be deduced that digital images “implies media convergence and new performance of sociality, reflecting broader shifts towards real-time, collaborative, networked ‘sociality at distance’” (Larsen and Sandbye 2014). This unprecedented use of the medium has established that “the performative aspects of photography are obvious not only when people take photographs, staging and posing, but also when editing their photographs, putting them in frames and albums, on blogs, and on websites” (Sandbye 2016). Such sociological revolution has also involved a change of view in the balance between private and public: if once, with analogue, pictures used to be conserved in photo albums, as family relics, now social media have overturned the approach to

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images, by transforming them in fragments of time ready to be shared with the global community In this way, photography has expanded the representation of emotions, feelings, memories, from an intimate character to a social sphere. As Steven Rosenbaum said in an article appeared on Forbes online, “in just a few short years our mobile phones driven world has turned a world of camera-shy and often appropriately modest friends and neighbours into a digitally connected world of on-camera performers... creating visual autobiographies in real-time” (Rosenbaum et al. 2015): in this way, people’s photographs have become a constant testament of human lives, where social media have replaced albums. If once albums were used for looking at the pictures shielded inside to hold the memories of the past, now the social media photographic purpose has become a channel showing the present, the immediacy of individuals’ everyday events. The social media connectivity links people in a circuit that, in turn, comprehends cultural interaction and public engagement, where the reality of relationships is fused with a virtual idea of ‘contact’ mediated by machines: this unknown frame can be identified as a “realtual” togetherness. Barthes’ phenomenological theory claimed that an image represents what “has-been-there” (Barthes 1980), an event, a subject, something happened in the past, but that cannot be replicated. Even this principle seems to have changed, because now people use social media photography to show “what-is-going on” (Sandbye 2016), thanks to the synchrony caused by the photographic connection between sender and receiver through the technological convergence. In this dynamic, since the human mind cannot globally encompass the concept of a fleeting time photography has become the vehicle that allows people to capture fragments of this immense reality: as Susan Sontag pointed out that images are “small units of an apparently infinite number - as the number of photographs that could be taken is unlimited” (Sontag 1977). Considering the date when the book was written, the statement of Sontag in which “today everything exists to end in a photograph” (Sontag 1977) sounds quite prophetic and more than ever actual. In fact, with social media photography, the sensation is that users feel the urge to capture their everyday life as much as possible so they can enjoy it with other individuals and, in doing so, images acquire the same ephemeral character of time, giving to photography a colloquial appearance through “photographs intended to be enjoyed only in the moment, but not necessarily in the distant future” (Villi 2010). In this frame, there is “an interplay between presence and absence” (Larsen and Sandbye 2014), where the physical distance is filled by a presence in time: not by chance, the instantaneousness of a connection in time, given by the internet, finds a perfect cohesion with photography’s peculiarity of expressing emotions, feelings, sensations, more deeply and directly that any other form of communication.

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It is not a coincidence that these dynamics find validation within a society that has extended its dimension to a worldwide scale, where the earth has become what Marshall McLuhan called a “global village” (McLuhan 1962): in this context, the speed of communication has been increased by the internet, and the opportunity to produce information has given users the medium which tears down almost all the barriers represented by geographical and political borders. Once again it can be noticed that physical and virtual have been hybridised, and the first has been revolutionised by the latter, through an “extension of consciousness” (McLuhan 1962), in which photography plays the role of messenger among the people. The huge amount of images taken by individuals have quickly become patterns of information more detailed than words, and the ‘depiction’ of data that human beings must elaborate in the social media communication system, involves the use of sensibility, so that the intrinsic message represented can be understood. Photographs disclose to people the access to a certain scenario, a sort of window through which one can enter and see what another person is experiencing, where imagination becomes the fuel for this kind of rapture. So, if on one hand social media photography connects people in real time, on the other hand it also conserves the peculiarity of a time machine, because cameras are instruments capable of creating a magical interaction between the photographer’s mind, which is behind the lens, and the subject located in front of it. An image is an interface capable to create a daydream activity when captured by the sight, and Barthes affirms that in photography the “referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation” (Barthes 1980) because a “photographic referent is not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers, but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (Barthes 1980), also implying that imagination assumes a key role behind the meaning of a picture. The force of visual representation is incarnated in “its capacity to move us: the best images take us from one emotional state (e.g. passive, curious, bored) and carry us into another (e.g. shocked, sad, amused)” (Lisle 2016). This transcendental trait of photography, determined by the interplay between human mind and the visual representation, is strengthened by the idea that “camera phone practices provide new ways of mapping places beyond just the geographic: they partake in adding social, emotional, psychological and aesthetic dimensions to a sense of place” (Hjort and Pink et al. 2014). The elaboration of an image inside the human mind could be understood as a process in which the 2D visual representation acquires a 3D imaginative feature of it: photographs stimulate emotions, which on their turn release the fuel necessary to perceive the represented experience.

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Social media photography has also determined a phenomenon of ‘visual’ appropriation of spaces that users have discovered through their shots: as a matter of fact “in-between places like trains, buses or the walk between one building to another are no longer contexts for just ‘killing time’. These wayfarer spaces, as an embedded part of everyday life, have now become key moments where new forms of visuality (Ingold 2007) and sociality are generated, through camera phone photography and the digital co-presence associated with locative media” (Hjort and Pink et al. 2014). This environments recall at the principle theorised by Marc Augé, a French anthropologist, who called non-places (Augé 1995) all those areas which are separated by the identity, the relation, and the history of the country where they are located, comprehending the structures necessary for the ceaseless movement of persons and goods like highways, interchanges, stations, airports, subways and all other means of transport, large shopping centres, outlets, waiting rooms, elevators and so on. The peculiarity of non-places is that people cross each others’ path without entering in contact, everyone driven by a frantic consumer’s desire or aimed at speeding up routine activities, places where individuals just go through without truly living them, appearing as a sort of ephemeral presences. Social media photography has stimulated people to build and to share visual relationships with non-places through an activity of depiction, and in doing so, images have become opportunities for viewers to linger on the nature of these spaces, documenting environments usually disregarded by human attention because of today’s frenzied life pace. Considering such endless flow the sensation that emerges is the creative feature of new media photography building “an ongoing moment without beginning and end” (Sandbye 2016), where “the database logic of new media” (Manovich 2001) has become the structure according to which human being is living this experience. Moreover, Manovich specifies that all the material “is digitally stored and composed with an archival, repetitive, circular, or ‘flat’ logic, rather than structured by a traditional, progressive narrative”, and if we look at Instagram, the photographic social media by antonomasia, it can be noticed that shots are just posted by users in a random pattern as an immense visual mosaic which does not depict a continuous dynamic story, but thousands of personal everyday life fragmented slices, which are more similar to a post-it note system of images. So, the photographic narration is conceptualised in the single pictures portraying a single moment in which the viewer can empathise with the emotions, the vibrations, the inspirations of others. Even if the photograph is a fragment of a certain situation “the world of flux out of which the image is extracted includes the image itself, and in that sense, an image can never be isolated from the world it is derived from” (Lisle 2016).

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In the age of networked images, vernacular photography has been enhanced by the broad use of camera phones, which have allowed people to express their ordinary life through self-representation and self-expression. The social media frame has stimulated people “to participate, to post-produce something captured in order to later return it to the Internet, modified in some way and made available to others” (Rodriguez-Ferrandiz 2016): the digital photographic process of production and post-production has been de facto enriched of a third phase, which is constituted by the act of sharing the images captured across the network. Another aspect that has influenced the individuals’ familiarity with technology, and consequentially camera phone photography, is the sense of touch, that has revived a typical child’s attitude in which the human being is fascinated by the physical contact: the same desire felt by babies to touch everything in their surrounding environment can be observed in the attraction that a smartphone touchscreen exerts on adults. The touch is obviously related to the body, which “is the place where the intellect and the senses come together and constitute meaningful thinking” (Elo 2016). Therefore, not just the view is involved in the photographic process, because “image, body and thinking relate to each other in a circular way: both body and thinking make use of images, both images and bodies think, and both thinking and images involve a body” (Elo 2016). From such deduction, it can be intended how in photography, view and touch are interconnected in a continuous interplay characterised by “physical body, phenomenological body and libidinal body” (Elo 2016): the first is constituted by the physique, the second are the facts, what happens around the physical presence, and all the things through which human being comes in contact, while the third is the excitement, the attraction that arises, involving a human reaction. In the contemporary world, technology has changed photography through introducing new horizons, providing new instruments such as camera phones, and the possibility to connect in time a huge number of individuals: with this revolution, one of the major impact has been the advent of technology in the daily life of people. As stated by Margaret Olin there is an intertwining between sight and touch, where “the two activities seem to alternate like a blinding eye, as though we cannot do both at the same time” (Olin 2012), because “a photograph is touching when it provokes speech by being mute, and when it opens up a space for thinking by a gesture of closing itself off, by being individually separate and distinct” (Elo 2016). In this frame is contained the potential core of an image, the capacity to give a voice understandable just by the senses, that consists in the production of imaginaries where time and space are reconstructed by photography to eternalise moments.

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So, the senses’ interplay takes shots in the human mind before than the camera, and “photograph’s entry to the realm of representations is mediated besides vision also by a distant touch - not unlike an eye contact that seizes the gaze only as absent” (Elo 2016): it can be understood that the coexistence between virtual and real has already existed before the advent of new technologies and digital media, because the intellect takes thousands of images every day, and the camera is the medium which allows people to concretise such pictures, in order to make them forms of communication. Camera phones have opened the possibility to share all the pictures that the human mind conceives, in a continuous activity of visual interaction, such as existence’s proofs through which it seems paramount to communicate as much as possible what is happening around: in the hyper connected world of nowadays, the 1968 Andy Warhol’s sentence by which “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”, sounds as a prophecy, because, as a matter of fact, the internet is potentially able to provide a global scale visibility for anybody, through blogs, sites, social media, and the prevision for which “hierarchy of subjects worthy to be represented will someday be abolished” (Buchloch 2001) has become a reality. Thus, senses acquire a key role, where “the implicit aim is to functionalize touch and to integrate it into a system of digital mediations in order to increase the sense of instantaneity and realism. In these settings, touch tends to become represented as a sense that works in synchrony with vision offering a support for optical intuitionism” (Elo 2016). The sense of touch is generally related to the pathos, the Greek term that represents the irrationality through which a person lives its emotions: the punctum of an image theorised by Barthes consists exactly in a “pathic moment” (Waldenfels 2002), which “refers to exposedness that is implicated in all forms of touching” (Elo 2016). The human approach to images consists in an interaction experience, and a sort of “haptic realism” (Elo 2016) takes place, where it seems that the human being has the urge to maintain a physical contact dimension, in face of the virtual pressure on his reality. For such reason, it follows that “the difference between ‘haptic realism’ in film-based and in digitally mediated photography (...) would thus lie in their different ways of enhancing hapto-visual appropriation” (Elo 2016): in the social media frame, photography consists not only in capturing an act of time, but also in the personal adaptation of it depending on the affection of a person for a certain moment or place. So it can be deduced that “in their technological environment photographs engage the viewers, or perhaps more precisely the users, more and more often by being hotspots” (Elo 2016) and consequentially “the tensional relation between vision and touch (...) implies that it is the affective link between the user’s body and digital

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information that tends to motivate the visual appearance of media contents in digital culture” (Elo 2016). It is particularly interesting to notice through the numbers how the dramatic increase of social media use among the society has conferred to photography the most powerful vehicle of communication. A comprehension of digital, social and mobile usage around the world is needed: a report conducted by We Are Social, a communication agency that works especially through social media, has analysed a sample of thirty countries of all continents, illustrating that in 2016 the amount of active social media users is 2,31 billions of people, 31% of the global population, while the total number of mobile users is 1,97 billions, tantamount to 27% of all kinds of devices used. In this frame, the social network that mostly represents the new use of photography as a language is Instagram, which counts 400 millions active users who produce and release around 80 millions of photo per day, generating a dense traffic of visual contents around the world. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, is spreading its influence across the web through different sectors of the society, such as the fashion world, where “designers and brands are responding to a desire to storytelling, inviting their Instagram followers into a previous closed world. Show lighting and set design is planned with Instagram in mind and it’s now the place where trends become reality and model’s careers are made” (Jenkins et al. 2015). Even if many professional photographers use Instagram, there has been a protest involving a group of remarkable photography organisations, based in the US and in Europe, such as The American Society of Media Photographers, The Digital Media Licensing Association, Coordination of European Picture Agencies Stock and others, against “Instagram's terms of use, which, they argue, are too far reaching and unfair to users” (Laurent et al. 2013). In fact, as they support, just “few of the users who share images on the site understand the rights they are giving away” (Laurent et al. 2013), within a dynamic where “the Terms of Use give Instagram perpetual use of photos and video as well as the nearly unlimited right to license the images to any and all third parties” (Laurent et al. 2013). So, the Terms of Use in this case seem to be a yielding of rights by the individual in favour of Instagram, where “users also relinquish the right to terminate the agreement. Once uploaded, they cannot remove their work and their identity from Instagram. Additionally, in the event of litigation regarding a photo or video, it is the account holder who is responsible for attorney and other fees, not Instagram” (Laurent et al. 2013). But a few weeks later such denouncing campaign held by the above mentioned photography organisations, Kevin Systrom, the Instagram founder, affirmed that the site “has changed the way people see the world” (Laurent et al. 2013), becoming “a common element of life” (Laurent et al. 2013) in society, where individuals can

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shoot their life everywhere, demonstrating how the opportunity to have a personal “showroom” has become a strong appeal for people who want to expand their experiences to an amazing amount of recipients, in exchange for their privacy. An interesting fact is that until then, Systrom used to say that “if Instagram were full of commerce and there were ‘buy now’ links everywhere and that is all you ever had, I don’t think it would get to the true spirit of communication that I was talking about before” (Laurent et al. 2013): apparently in 2015 things have changed when “Instagram opened its platform to most advertisers across the globe” (Abutaleb et al. 2015), reaching more than 200 countries and millions of users. One of the most influential activity in social media photography is travelling, where storytellers use camera phones to document their trips through the sharing of pictures, and for this purpose “Instagram is broadening our horizons as we seek ever more photogenic locations” (Jenkins et al. 2015). The world of art has also been influenced by the advent of Instagram, that has contributed “to open the former to a wider audience too” (Jenkins et al. 2015), in which photographers, painters, sculptors and so on, are using the medium to preview or promote their art works: Rafaël Rozendaal, a Dutch-Brazilian visual artist says that “it opens up the artistic process to a broader audience; it demystifies the life of artists. At the same time it creates myths. Instagram is an extra organ, an extension of the body. I would like it if the likes and comments weren't there though. Just images, no hierarchy” (Jenkins et al. 2015). With this affirmation it becomes clear that Instagram on one hand creates more proximity between the artist activity and the audience during the production and the immediate outcome, often in a preview mode, but on the other hand it builds a fame aura around the same artist, who becomes the protagonist of a new concept of developing art work, embracing the entire art work production process. In this way, a photographer has the opportunity to display his photographic material, reaching and attracting an unprecedented network of people who use the medium, thereby creating a global gallery of every kind of photographic “intention”, from art to vernacular. In fact, as stated by Nadav Hochmann and Lev Manovich (2013) “the default presentation of images does not employ groups of documented events (or private albums), which may contain each user’s photos and create a cohesive narrative. Instead, photographs are presented as a continuous stream of images from various users. Users perceive a montage of images taken by people they follow, thus eliminating notions of “traditional” time or event presentations and cataloguing” (Hochmann and Manovich 2013). So, the art world system has been revolutionised by an innovative factor through which art material is canalised from the source to the addressees, changing the previous dynamics of distribution of photographic material: as said by Jordan Teicher in his online article on American Photo, the “traditional gatekeepers in the

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world of street photography—the museum curators, the gallerists, the newspaper and magazine editors—still hold significant sway. But through Instagram, photographers have found that amassing a vast following can provide a fast track to those power players who, in previous generations, would have been elusive, if not impossible, targets” (Teicher et al. 2015). As a matter of fact, Instagram represents the place where people have expressed their lives with images, depicting a “filtered, shadowed, sharpened, brightened, tilted, faded, structured, saturated way of seeing life through a lens” (Swant et al. 2015): thus “the application allows its users to apply different manipulation tools. By adding hues, grain, contrast, etc., each filter evokes a different “feel” changing the message communicated by an image. In this way, while taking a photo of a specific time and place, we apply a filter to it to suggest a different time or atmosphere” (Hochmann and Manovich 2013). Consequently, the interplay between time and space in photography returns once again, though acting in a different perspective through which “the result is a multi–temporal image which suggests at least three different temporal references: the actual time when the picture was taken, the time evoked by a certain filter, and the time span indicated by the application when viewing the photo. Ironically, while a geo–temporal tagged image connotes the precision of time and space coordinates (we know the exact longitude/latitude coordinates together with the exact time it was taken) the software subverts this message by displaying multiple users’ photostreams in a single feed, a relative time indication, and a distorted, filtered photographic image” (Hochmann and Manovich 2013). Particularly in street photography camera phones “have changed not just how these image-makers shoot and relate with their peers, but also the way they display their work and achieve success” (Teicher et al. 2015): the change “has not only widened the definition of who can be a street photographer, but it has expanded our concept of the street” (Teicher et al. 2015), moving its focus on a spatial order, where photographs discover “parts of the world, or communities in otherwise well-covered cities that, decades ago, were greatly underserved” (Teicher et al. 2015). Instagram has intrigued many inexperienced people by photography, getting them closer to the visual medium, starting to “photograph the world around them on a daily basis, increasing and discovering a love for photography” (Prives et al. 2012?). On the other side, many professional photographers have familiarised with it, as explained by Guy Prives: “I have lived in the world of photography for several years and keep a close eye on every new and innovative discovery in this field. It is this reason I was exposed to this application at an early stage; more than a year ago now. After just a brief observation I fell in love with it and started to upload not only photographs I had taken with my own cell phone but also many pictures that I had taken with my camera. I like to share my work and images that reflect my personal

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life with my friends both of which increase in number as time goes on” (Prives et al. 2012?). But where does this kind of attraction for a photograph derive from, and in particular, do contemporary images overcome the use of words in social media communication? The answer seems to be contained in the so-called picture superiority effect, which consists in a preponderance of images over words within human memory, due to the fact that it is “extremely sensitive to the symbolic modality of presentation of event information” (Yuille 2014). In this frame, the picture superiority effect finds its basis in the “dual-coding theory” speculated by Allan Paivio in 1971, in which verbal association and visual imagery works together in order to represent information acquired by the human mind: despite working simultaneously, they “are processed differently and along distinct channels in the human mind, creating separate representations for information processed in each channel. The mental codes corresponding to these representations are used to organize incoming information that can be acted upon, stored, and retrieved for subsequent use” (Wikipedia 2016). For instance, while thinking about what happens when the human mind elaborates a certain thought, the immediate recall is an imagery from where subsequently information is acquired, where “the crucial point about such experiences is that the eliciting question and the behavioural expression of recall may be entirely verbal, but the mediating mechanism apparently consists of nonverbal imagery associatively evoked by the words” (Paivio 1971). Social media photography brings the human mind directly in a nonverbal system of communication, where the character of visual immediacy on screens seems to adhere with the human mind visual data elaboration: in this way, the imagery psychological process is playing a key role in the new form of social media photographic language. Following such reasoning, Paivio affirms that concrete imagery consists in “nonverbal memory representations of concrete objects and events, or nonverbal modes of thought (e.g., imagination) in which such representations are actively generated and manipulated by the individual” (Paivio 1971): so, it is like if human mind not only contains space for the storage of images, but also for a sort of mental elaboration of such photographs, in which a person “corrects” or “modifies” the images through his personal perception and imagination, as well as a computer post-production program for digital pictures. A sort of codified representation of feelings and sensations has been built, where technology not only has become a physical extension of the photographic practice of taking a shot, but also a deep connection with the emotional part that characterises the outcome, or in other words, the stimuli that captures a given moment.

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When Paivio considers that the abstractedness of visual representation “requires the manipulation of spatially and temporally remote events” (Paivio 1971), he finds a correspondence with the interconnection between time and space in social media photography: the sender of an image is geographically distant from the receiver, but in real-time is connected, so a certain experience is shared at the same moment of its happening, creating an unprecedented spatiotemporal connection. The photographic practice traditionally “involves an ability to manipulate (mentally) the components of a stimulus situation in order to conceptualise the not-here and not-now” (Paivio 1971), but now the omnipresence of an internet connection and the effect of social media, which act as communicative poles, have allowed humans to bridge the physical absence through images that report human experiences in real-time: the visual representation is limiting the sensation of distance, not reporting things already happened and concluded, but rather teleporting the viewer in an event which is simultaneously taking place. Connie Malamed, a consultant, author, and speaker in the fields of visual design, online learning, and information design, says that “a new meaning emerges when a person takes a picture at an event and then immediately sends it to friends. The photograph becomes a way to virtually bond and interact. The transmitted photo won’t be organized into an album or viewed with family in the future. Rather, the photograph’s meaning resides in its immediate experiential value. It’s part of an ongoing conversation where the sharing of photos is done in the context of peer-group environments more than at home” (Malamed et al. 2016?). The relationship between visual sense and space is also recalled when Paivio assumes that “the receptors and higher neural elements of the visual system are spatially organized, capable of receiving, transmitting and processing information simultaneously given in a spatial array” (Paivio 1971): from this statement it is clear how fast is the information reception process of the human mind when it comes in contact with an image. An important aspect which characterises the visual power in communication is the fact that it does not need any translation, which is also the key to understanding how social media photography works as a communicative medium all over the world. For this reason, the focus moves on the significance of meaning, which explains the real value of the communicative act, where “the meaning of a word is the mental image it arouses” (Paivio 1971): through this dynamics human minds decode the spoken and written meanings of languages in images. MIT neuroscientists have proven that “the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds — the first evidence of such rapid processing speed” (Trafton et al. 2014), clarifying how much the images learning mechanism in human mind is more immediate compared to words.

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An interesting fact is “that speed is far faster than the 100 milliseconds suggested by previous studies” (Trafton et al. 2014), where one of the main cause of this phenomenon could be the whirling and continuous stream of pictures that have generated this new form of visual language, which has enhanced the photographic analytical ability of the human being. Mary Potter, the MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the study, titled Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, says “the fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts. That’s what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we’re looking at” (Trafton et al. 2014). So, in this case concepts are the result of a process of data assimilation, in which “the job of the eyes is not only to get the information into the brain, but to allow the brain to think about it rapidly enough to know what you should look at next. So in general we’re calibrating our eyes so they move around just as often as possible consistent with understanding what we’re seeing” (Trafton et al. 2014): the huge images flow, and the consequent gathering in memory, both generate a consequentiality where the brain is able to focus on the essence of a context in a few instants, thus constructing a continuous visual pattern able not only to see the past, but also to expect what should happens next. In the experiment conducted by MIT “researchers asked subjects to look for a particular type of image, such as “picnic” or “smiling couple,” as they viewed a series of six or 12 images, each presented for between 13 and 80 milliseconds” (Trafton et al. 2014). What has changed from the previous studies on this matter is that “the human brain can correctly identify images seen for as little as 100 milliseconds” (Trafton et al. 2014): what Mary Potter and her team have varied in their experiment is the increase of “speed until they reached a point where subjects’ answers were no better than if they were guessing. All images were new to the viewers” (Trafton et al. 2014). Surprisingly, even if “overall performance declined, subjects continued to perform better than chance as the researchers dropped the image exposure time from 80 milliseconds to 53 milliseconds, then 40 milliseconds, then 27, and finally 13 — the fastest possible rate with the computer monitor being used” (Trafton et al. 2014). Also Simon Thorpe, director of the Centre de Recherche Cerveau & Cognition at the University of Tolouse, affirms that the new experiment “shows that the meaning of an image can be extracted even when an image is mixed up in a sequence of six or even 12 images presented at 13 milliseconds per image — a rate of about 75 frames a second. Another striking finding was that the effect is also seen when the question concerning the target is only presented after the sequence has been run, meaning that the brain can extract meaning even when there is no way to predict what will be shown” (Trafton et al. 2014).

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Another important contribute comes from Maximilian Riesenhuber, head of the Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC), who stated that human being “are not recognizing words by quickly spelling them out or identifying parts of words, as some researchers have suggested. Instead, neurons in a small brain area remember how the whole word looks — using what could be called a visual dictionary” (Teber et al. 2015), another confirmation of the existence of a photographic database in the brain, which is decisive for the comprehension of verbal language. The study that GUMC has conducted involved 25 adult participants, who had to learn a set of 150 nonsense words: a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to investigate on the relationship between brain’s plasticity with learning capability both before and after training. What has emerged from the investigation is “that the visual word form area changed as the participants learned the nonsense words. Before training the neurons responded like the training words were nonsense words, but after training the neurons responded to the learned words like they were real words” (Teber et al. 2015): from this result it can be assumed that the visual word form area (VWFA) is the vehicle through which people confer a particular meaning also to nonsense words, thus contributing to the acquisition of them. Dustin Stokes from the University of Utah and Stephen Biggs from Iowa State University have argued that “vision is taken to be the paradigmatic perceptual sense, and its structure is then imputed to the other sense modalities in a way that is insensitive to differences among modalities” (Biggs and Stokes 2014), recognising the sight sense as the one which is capable to “drive” all the others. The ultimate social media platform, which seems to be more photographic even than Instagram, is Snapchat, an instantaneous messaging service where the message itself lasts just for a limited time period, before been erased: “we realise that this is not just individual experience, it is a social act, we take pictures in order to share, and to see the response to our sharing. We have to take the word ‘Snapchat’ literally – the photograph is just a form of chat, saying Hi, a more interesting emoticon” (Miller et al. 2014). It is interesting to notice how Snapchat has risen in the last year, overcoming other important social media such as Twitter and Pinterest: a research commissioned by Edison Research evidences that in 2016 among Americans aged 12 and over, Snapchat is used by 8% of the population, with a 4% increase compared to 2015. This data certifies that social media photography “has really empowered this idea of instant expression, which is really showing someone where you are and how you’re feeling in the moment” (Dredge et al. 2015) In reference to that “the default setting for almost everything people share online is that it will live for eternity in the cloud” (Gillette et al. 2013), and with the passage of time this could create “problems for individuals and societies that need the ability

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to forget in order to move forward” (Gillette et al. 2013): thinking about these statements, it can be supposed that the success of Snapchat derives just from the possibility to share images of any kind, without having any thought about their permanence on the internet. As Nathan Jurgenson says “by refuting the assumption of the permanence of the image, Snapchat is a radical departure. It inaugurates temporary photography, in which photos are seen once by their chosen audience and then are gone in 10 seconds or less” (Jurgenson et al. 2013): in this way, Snapchat pictures are public human representation of everyday life with a limited abidance of time. What could happen in the future is that “photographs taken and shared as temporary will impart more meaning to those chosen to be permanent. In the age of digital abundance, photography desperately needs this introduction of intentional and assured mortality, so that some photos can become immortal again” (Jurgenson et al. 2013). So, Snapchat constitutes a further step of a radical change process in the meaning of photography, an extreme one, for which images have become messages utilised to represent what is going on more than what it used to be, and also in the words of Evan Spiegel, co-founder and chief executive of the site, it is possible to understand that “historically photographs have been used to save really important memories, major life moments, but today, with the advent of the mobile phone and the connected camera, pictures are being used for talking” (Horton et al. 2015). This is the confirm that photography is turning to a mass communicative dimension more than ever, where the visual character has acquired a dialectical trait through which people communicate in a more deep psychological way than the use of words. In this sense, McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964) is currently finding its incarnation in social media photography, where pictures are messages and medium at the same time, because they represent not just the contents of something, but are also the vehicle that brings information among people in the contemporary age.

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Conclusions All these elements has been fundamental to understand how photography is influencing communication between individuals, where technology has become a bodily extension through which people express and share their lives in images. Starting from the contextualisation of photography as a form of art, the theories of American sociologist Howard Becker and German philosopher Niklas Luhmann have been useful for this dissertation. Becker’s sources have contributed from a sociological point of view, and in particular for the redefinition of participants in the art world: technology has dramatically altered the previous scenario, which was characterised by the division between artists and the audience who used to consume their artworks, changing this dynamics in a global network where everybody can be both producer and consumer of photographic material, generating the figure of the “prosumer”. The support that has come from Luhmann has been fundamental to comprehend what has happened from a psychological point of view, focusing on the relationship between social and psychic systems in order to realise what entails the observation and interpretation in photography, making images real forms of communication. In this way, it has been possible to build up the basis of the dissertation discourse, making clear not only what is intended by photography as a proper form of art, but also its communicational meaning in the contemporary age both individually and sociologically. Then, the discourse has illustrated how technology has changed photography, firstly with the passage from analogue to digital started in the nineties, a passage that has revolutionised the way in which individuals produce images: in fact, digital has transformed photography in a computerised practice, making possible the storage of huge loads of material in hard-disks, but above has offered the chance to develop and post-produce on one’s own account the pictures taken through specific software programs. With the arrival of the new millennium, a first and significant convergence has taken place between two kinds of tools that were distinct until that moment, phone and camera, which combined together have changed the use of the photographic medium by people. The fusion of these devices has opened new perspectives for individuals, in which the photographic act has broadened its communicative potential into people’s everyday life, consequentially increasing the domestication of photography: in this way, this form of art has started to become not just an artistic or documentary practice done by professionals, but a way to express everyone’s feelings, emotions, and so on, via the images. After that, in the course of the noughties, the internet has progressively acquired importance, becoming a global network able to connect people through increasingly

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faster connections: this phenomenon has determined the inception of social media sites, virtual places in which individuals have started to share photographic material. In this way, the second convergence between camera phones, the omnipresence of the internet, and social media platforms, has been decisive for the formation of an unprecedented photographic global mass language, characterised by a form of presence in time and a physical absence in space. Moreover, other issues have been modified like the dynamics that links real and virtual or the relationship between private and public: the first has been subjected to the progressive hybridisation between human being and technology in photographic production and distribution processes, while the latter has involved a transformation of habits. For instance, pictures that used to be kept in albums and shared with family or friends, now are globally disclosed on social media, where private and public spheres have been fused together in the absence of any barrier. In the end, an excursus on the role of photography in social media has been traced, supported by statistical and psychological sources, proving that visual is overcoming the use of words in social communication mediated by technology.

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